How Walmart protects against cyber threats

In today’s complex security landscape, cyber attacks can disrupt companies, institutions and governments in the blink of an eye. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2025, 45% of organizations worldwide will have experienced attacks on their software supply chains.

The focus of Walmart’s Information Security team is to secure our operating environment in service of building and maintaining trust with our customers, associates and stakeholders. Today, our systems are currently consuming millions of events per minute.

To help manage the scale of threat actors, we lean heavily into automation. We deploy best-in-class tooling when it’s available and build our own toolsets when commercial offerings do not meet our needs.

We recently turned to our internal Security Operations team and a team of computer science Ph.D.s to help us build a new capability. This capability is now blocking hundreds of millions of potential attacks annually. Its proven capability has also been adopted by other organizations to address their cybersecurity needs.

Another focus of ours is “Grinch Bots.” As more holiday commerce volume has shifted online, we worked to eliminate these bots via automated, purpose-built capabilities that only allow legitimate customers to purchase products. Last year, we blocked about 8.5 billion bot attacks per month.

At Walmart, we are hyper-focused on delivering great experiences to our customers. We remain constantly vigilant and proactive in our efforts that enable associates across our enterprise to protect our customers, every single day.